The Senate’s bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act with the American Health Care Act (AHCA) is not a healthcare bill. It’s a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, paid for by a dramatic reduction in healthcare funding for approximately 23 million poor, disabled, working and middle-class Americans.

America’s wealthiest taxpayers (earning more than $200,000 a year, $250,000 for couples) would get a tax cut totaling $346bn over 10 years, representing what they save from no longer financing healthcare for lower-income Americans.

That’s not all. The bill would save an additional $400bn on Medicaid, which Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump are intent on shrinking in order to cut even more taxes for the wealthy and for big corporations.

If enacted, it would be the largest single transfer of wealth to the rich from the middle class and poor in American history.

This disgrace is being proposed at a time when the country’s rich receive the highest percentage of America’s income since the era of the robber barons of the late nineteenth century. They have received virtually all income growth since 1981 because of their massive financial and political power.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “As Medicaid is slashed, households’ premium costs (will) skyrocket, and protections for people with preexisting conditions are eliminated, 23 million Americans will lose their health insurance by 2026. The majority would lose it to breathtakingly large cuts to the vital Medicaid program (almost $900 billion over the next decade). Further, millions more would lose the coverage they get through their employer if AHCA passes.”

In other words, the AHCA is a massive income redistribution program from the 99 to the 1 percent.

The rich are about to win politically again through their corruption of the federal government.

President Trump has wasted no time in taking aim at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. Joint research from the Urban Institute and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation show up to 30 million Americans may lose their healthcare coverage if the ACA is repealed. For high-income investors, however, the end of Obamacare could bring a financial windfall.

Rebecca Lake of Investopedia.com points out that individuals earning over $200,000 and couples filing jointly and earning over $250,000 a year pay an additional 0.9 percent Medicare tax helping to fund the ACA. In addition, another “provision is the 3.8% net investment income tax. This tax applies to capital gains on investments and it follows the same income thresholds as the additional Medicare tax.” Capital gains is money earned through the sale of assets, such as stocks and bonds.

Repealing Obamacare would put significant amounts of money back into the pockets of the rich, who would then use their newly created windfall to pump more money into the current stock market bubble, blowing it up even more and blowing away the economy much more severely when it explodes, as well as use the funds to corrupt government even more in their favor. The rich already own the entire Republican Party, and most of the Democratic Party.

“An analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has found that millionaires would stand to get an 80% tax cut if the additional Medicare tax and the tax on net investment income were to disappear. The average tax break for those earning more than $1 million annually would total just over $49,000.” The 400 biggest income earners would receive a tax cut of over $7 million each. That would be a tax cut every year for infinity for the folks who have corrupted both major political parties and rigged the economic and political game in their favor.

No doubt, any replacement for the ACA will be written to shift the tax burden from those who have political and economic power to those who do not. In other words, the Republicans and President Trump are redistributing income and wealth from the 99 to the 1 percent via repeal of the ACA. The Republicans are likely setting up some form of death panels by simply repealing the ACA and replacing it with something that will be underfunded.

Official portrait of President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, Dec. 6, 2012.

President Obama was no Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but he did take office during an economic crisis greater than any since the Great Depression, a mess helped along by the worst and one of the most corrupt presidents of all time, George W. Bush. I don’t consider Obama to be a great president. I don’t think we’ve had one since Harry Truman. That being said, I think he’ll be remembered fondly even though he was largely a puppet of Wall Street.

1. Obama actually accomplished quite a bit despite the fact the Republican Party leadership fought against almost everything he wanted tooth and nail even if it meant sending the United States down the tubes. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell said, “Our top political priority over the next two years is to deny President Obama a second term.”

2, Got us out of the illegal and costly occupation of Iraq.

3. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). This became the first time in US history the government could tax us for not buying something, which is not a good sign since now the government can tax you on anything you choose to not purchase. This legislation also drove up health care costs for everybody, increased deductibles and co-pays.

3. Ended the trade embargo against Iran, which put Iranian oil back on the market and helped drive down the cost of oil and gasoline.

4. Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for seven years, creating 12 million new private-sector jobs. However, it should be pointed out that on a per month basis this growth was worst than that which occurred under President Jimmy Carter. On the other hand, monthly job growth of all of the presidents since Carter have been worst than what happened under Jimmy.

Worst Action?

Along with Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, President Obama continuously groveled at the feet of Wall Street and other big corporate executives, which is why he mightily tried to secretly ram through the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). Obama promised an open and honest administration, but he was extremely secretive about the TPP, most likely because it would’ve exported millions of US jobs and redistributed trillions of dollars from working folks to Wall Street and other corporate executives and rich shareholders.

Abolishing the Affordable Care Act will provide tax breaks for the rich. According to the LA Times, “the Affordable Care Act’s tax provisions, and the discovery that repeal would provide the wealthiest taxpayers with an immediate tax cut totaling $346 billion over 10 years. Every cent of that would go to taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for couples). As Nicholas Bagley of the University of Michigan observed a few days after the election, the imperative of handing their wealthy patrons a gift of this magnitude may well outweigh their solicitude for the mostly middle- and low-income constituents whose individual insurance plans would be at risk from repeal.”

All of the income gains of the last 35 years have gone to the 1 percent, and this has been achieved by government legislation and international trade scams that export jobs overseas, and the difference between the old higher US wages and the new lower overseas wages has always gone straight into the pockets of the 1 percent. Income from performing labor is taxed at a higher rate than just sitting on your ass doing nothing, and this has come about due to tax legislation.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, “The year 2014 saw policy address one aspect of labor market dysfunction—the enormous erosion in employer-sponsored health insurance coverage. Like wage stagnation, this problem was not confined to non-college-educated workers. The share of young college graduates who have employer-sponsored health insurance coverage fell from 60.7 percent in 1989 to 30.9 percent by 2012. For high-school graduates, the decline was even steeper, from 23.5 percent in 1989 to just 6.6 percent in 2012. This rapid unraveling of employer-sponsored insurance, even for recent college graduates, was a key impetus for health reform in 2009, and 2014 was the first year that the coverage provisions went into effect.”

Notice from the graph below that the declining number of employer provided health care policies coincided with rising income inequality. In addition, more and more people could not afford to purchase individual health insurance plans.

You will notice that as jobs were shipped overseas, as income was legislatively shifted to the top income earners, as real income stagnated since 1980 for 90 percent of Americans, as the health insurance industry jacked up the prices of their policies in illegal defiance of market forces, the abilities and willingness of employers to provide health care insurance as part of their employee compensation package declined.

People can rightly suspect that one of primary incentives for the Obama Administration and the health insurance industry to fight for and enact the Affordable Care Act was to provide more profits to the industry via government provided subsidies that boosted profits for the industry because ncome inequality had placed tremendous financial strains of the industry.

Which is why, perhaps, the health insurance executives who wrote the Affordable Care Act squashed the idea of a competitive public option off the negotiating table long before negotiations even began, and President Obama went for it.

The profits of the five largest health insurance companies have risen thanks to the Affordable Health Care Act, because the number of government subsidized individual health care plans they offer has soared since 2012. This suggests that keeping profits rising with government subsidies was a major and perhaps the primary reason the health insurance industry decided to support the enactment of the Affordable Health Care Act.

The Rigged Game: Corporate America and A People Betrayed

The Rigged Game: Corporate America and a People Betrayed

Wall Street is up to no good, and has been since 1980, when it took over the Republican Party, and then the Democratic Party in 1994. Income has been massively redistributed from the 99 to the 1 percent via legislative scam after scam, from tax cuts for the rich to international income redistribution schemes falsely labeled as trade agreements. In The Rigged Game, John Hively exposes how this has all come about starting with a revolutionary, but simple reality, all recessions begin in the financial markets.